I Could Never Go Vegan

“I think it's great what you're doing, but I don't think I could ever go vegan.” This phrase, “I don't think I could ever go vegan,” is one that I hear a lot in my activism, or even just day to day interactions with people. With that one statement people entirely shut themselves down to being influenced by any argument we might have to make. I could spend days presenting every case for why other animals deserve similar consideration for their interests and how they are being callously denied their most essential interests currently, but if the person I was presenting to opened with, “I don't think I could ever go vegan,” my money is on my arguments falling on deaf ears 99 times out of 100. Recently I've started using the following reply when people tell me that they could never go vegan:

I totally understand that not everyone I talk to is going to go vegan right away, but the things that are happening currently [on factory farms] are things that I think anyone would be troubled by. We each make decisions every day about what we consume, and even if someone isn't going to go fully vegan, every time they make a choice to avoid animal products is a major victory for the animals suffering on our factory farms.

There are a lot of things I've liked about this response. While a moment ago they were someone who could never go vegan, I've subtly recast their statement to emphasize that they merely were not taking the leap right away. Additionally, I've encouraged them to start looking at each individual decision they are making and emphasized the relative importance of the decision for the animals. Finally, I'm always very careful to use terms like “we” and “our” as often as possible when discussing making decisions and always use the more generic “someone” or “people” instead of the more accusatory “you” and “your” when the former terms are not possible.

In giving this response to someone last week I started wondering: “Just how much impact does each one of our decisions have for the animals suffering on factory farms?” Luckily, the question is a fairly simple one to answer. To determine the answer I put together the table below with rough approximations of how long the animals used for the products below live in a typical modern production system and roughly how much product is generally acquired by the time the animals are slaughtered. I divided the time by the amount of product to get the amount of time spent suffering per unit of product produced.

Product	Animal Life	Unit	Production	Unit	Suffering
Beef	600	Days	750	lbs	1,152 min/lb
Chicken	45	Days	3	lbs	21,600 min/lb
Pork	250	Days	200	lbs	1,800 min/lb
Dairy	1,500	Days	1,000	gal	216 min/gal
Eggs	1,000	Days	800	eggs	1,800 min/egg

The values in the table are only rough approximations and could probably vary by as much as a factor of 1.5 in either direction from farm to farm. Nonetheless, the table still gives us very useful data for how important each of our decisions is. The amount of suffering that goes into producing chicken and eggs far away outpaces any of the other products. If someone wants to know what is most important for them to give up right away, our answer should always be chicken and eggs. On the other end of the spectrum, dairy involves far less time spent suffering than any of these other products; yet, I still can't imagine any plausible amount of pleasure we could get out of a gallon of dairy that could possibly justify the over three hours a dairy cow was subjected to in factory farm conditions to support our demand (not to mention the plethora of easy dairy substitutes).

We won't be able to get every person with whom we speak to go vegan right away, but plenty of people will be willing to start looking at their individual decisions in more detail. Hopefully with this data and knowledge of the unimaginable horrors our fellow animals endure on our factory farms, more people will be willing to make all of their decisions victories for the animals.

Animal Millionaires

Hello to all my loyal blog readers. First of all, I would like to apologize for the long hiatus between posts. I started working at a new job in mid-December, and while this has been able to meet many of my needs, it has kept me away from updating this blog for the past couple months. This blog is certainly a project I wish to continue however, and I hope to get back into fairly regular updates as I settle into my new position.

Recently, as I was getting to bed at my new early bedtime, I decided I should put together a list of goals for myself. I wrote down all of one item on this list before I got distracted and eventually fell asleep. The one item I put down on my list was, “Become an animal millionaire”.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the term it is one that Erik Marcus brings up fairly regularly on his vegan.com blog. An animal millionaire is someone who, through their actions, has led to a million animals' lives being saved.

What would it take to become an animal millionaire?

Some people choose to foster animals to help save them from certain deaths in shelters. I imagine I could probably foster roughly 15 cats or dogs at a time, over their roughly 15 year life spans. Given that I likely have roughly 60 years left to live myself, I could probably save 60-ish lives by fostering animals. This would also come at a cost of tens, possibly even the low hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Another technique many have chosen to take for the animals is illegal direct action. Supposing I chose to put my direct action directly towards saving animals (as opposed to causing property damage), my most optimistic projection would be that I could rescue a few thousand animals before earning an extended sentence in my own cage.

This is at least far better than the marginally legal direct action group Sea Shepherd, which manages to get Japan to miss their whaling quota by a few hundred in a good year (out of a quota of roughly 1000 whales). This comes at a cost of millions of dollars to the animal rights movement, and a crew of what appears to be dozens of people. Sea Shepherd's activism comes at a cost of roughly $10,000 per whale saved and saves a mere 10 animals per person-year of work by the crew.

Legislative challenges vary greatly depending on the piece of legislation. California's proposition 2 will likely impact the lives of billions of animals once it goes into effect; although, it is unclear how many, if any, lives will ultimately be spared by this piece of legislation. This came at a cost of roughly $10 million from the YES side, and required perhaps a couple thousand person-years of work. Missouri's proposition B on the other hand will influence the lives of no more than a couple hundred thousand animals per year. It came at a cost of $1.7 million in support to the YES side and likely several hundred person-years of work.

What if we spent our time trying to get as many people as possible to go vegan? If we really put our energy into it, we could talk to several hundred, perhaps even a couple thousand people per week. Obviously the vast majority of people would not make a large lifestyle change from their brief conversation with us, but out of speaking with a few thousand people, it is not unreasonable to think we could get at least one to make a change (along with hopefully pushing many others in the right direction). In a wealthy nation like the United States, getting just one young person to go vegan will typically save the lives of roughly 2000 animals over the remainder of that person's life. Vegan Outreach makes conversing with this many people on a regular basis entirely possible. They print out booklets that, in addition to presenting information to people in a clear and effective manner, also serve as excellent conversation starters with interested people.

Using Vegan Outreach materials, one of their leafleters, Vic Sjodin, managed to pass out booklets to over 100,000 people in a single semester. You may not be the veritable leafleting god that Vic is, but any person donating a full year of their labor to the cause, could most likely get out 100,000 booklets over the course of that year. Depending on how effective of communicators we are on behalf of the animals, it is entirely reasonable that we could get 50-100 people to go vegan over this time period, at a cost of no more than $12,000 to print those booklets (plus perhaps a few thousand more in gas costs). Getting a mere 50 young Americans to go vegan would amount to a million lives saved.



All of the figures in the above table are admittedly very rough estimates. Reasonable error bars on these would be as much as a factor of ten in either direction. Yet even admitting that much uncertainty, there is a clear winner if we are interested in doing what is best for the animals, and that difference is so much so, that using this method, any one of us could easily become an animal millionaire multiple times over within our lives.

Imagine yourself taking just one day every other week to leaflet at a college campus or a concert that young people will be attending. Similarly, imagine yourself setting aside just a couple hours worth of work from every paycheck to donate to Vegan Outreach. Taking these two small steps will set you up to easily reach the goal of becoming an animal millionaire within a decade. I challenge all of you to see which of us can accomplish this simple task the most times over.

Being Vegan is worse for the environment?

This past Thursday I leafleted a couple college campuses with Vegan Outreach materials to ensure that I didn't lose my place on the all time leafleting totals (nothing wrong with some healthy competition to help the animals). The first school I stopped at that day, West Valley College, was one of the most receptive schools I've ever been to. At West Valley College, however, I also talked to a young gentleman who tried to tell me that vegetarianism was actually worse for the environment and that the world couldn't sustain an all vegetarian human population. I wasn't out there trying to promote vegetarianism for environmental reasons, but I definitely didn't want environmental concerns to keep someone from giving fair consideration to non-human interests, so I mentioned that the error bars on any such study would have to be very large considering the difficulty of predicting what technologies might become practical under different economic circumstances, and that many estimates predict the earth can't sustain its current human population at all in the long run. I was being very modest since I certainly still believed there are environmental benefits to reducing our consumption of meat (in most cases), but this gentleman had not given me many details to work with. He dismissed my skeptical remarks adding that he had really looked into this in the past and was quite knowledgeable on the subject. He left me with the statement, “You should really look into it, man.” Needless to say I was still quite doubtful of his conclusion, but I am not one to pass up the chance to research a sketchy claim.

I began by doing a few Google searches to get an idea of where the claim may have originally come from: “Vegetarianism is worse for environment”, “Vegetarian bad for evironment”. All the top hits I got for these searches seemed to trace back to a single source. If I dug down a few pages into the results I found a couple older results, which generally traced back to the Weston A. Price foundation, but all the top results (that were relevant to my query) were published on or after Feb. 12, 2010. The earliest of these was an article published in The Telegraph titled, Becoming vegetarian 'can harm the environment'. Like all the other top results I was getting, this article in The Telegraph mentioned a Cranfield University study commissioned by the WWF. My task became clear. I had to track down this vaguely referenced study.

Luckily, the Telegraph article included a single quote from the study. “A switch from beef and milk to highly refined livestock product analogues such as tofu could actually increase the quantity of arable land needed to supply the UK.” This was the key I needed, and I was able to track this quote down to a pdf available on the WWF website. This study was affiliated with Cranfield University and was published a little less than a month prior to the Telegraph article. This was clearly the study being referenced. How Low Can We Go?: An assessment of greenhouse gas emissions from the UK food system and the scope for reduction by 2050.

My first thought was to check the methodology of this study, to make sure everything seemed appropriate and that it hadn't left out anything like forgetting to count feed crops toward livestock's impact, instead of putting it down as vegetarian food (I can hardly believe the things some people think we eat). The methodology was not just sound, but incredibly thorough, not just counting the feed toward livestock, but refrigeration, transportation, packaging, cooking, every single detail and bit of greenhouse gas seemed to be getting counted. I was beginning to think I may need to reconsider my views on the environmental consequences of vegetarianism, but first I needed to see the results to understand this conclusion for myself.

Very little of the study actually had to do with vegetarianism. The study was about the environmental (specifically in terms of greenhouse gasses) impact of our food choices, and vegetarianism only came up because one out of dozens of scenarios they looked into to mitigate future impact was adopting a no-meat diet. It seemed strange that all of the articles I had read had focused so much on this small aspect of the study, but it was what had attracted me to the articles in the first place, so I wasn't going to blame them for reporting on the bit that seemed interesting.

I still had not seen the original quote from The Telegraph that led me to this study in the first place, and as I read through the results they seemed to be in line what I would have expected. Beef seemed to be worst for the environment in nearly every area studied. Poultry was a far better (environmentally speaking) alternative to beef, and performed at roughly the same level most plant foods did. I was just waiting to come across some bombshell that would be an unexpected hit against vegetarianism. Production? No. Transportation? No. Packaging? No. Refrigeration? No. Disposal? No. Then I came to Table 24, which had results from their various scenarios for reducing future emissions (Click to enlarge).



Not only did no-meat reduce greenhouse gas emissions, it performed better than any other single measure looked at in the study even beating out such far-fetched alternatives as “zero fossil fuels”. I finished reading through the conclusion of the study and still did not find the quote from The Telegraph that had led me to this study in the first place. The conclusion did feel the need to mention the no-meat scenario however:

Diet provides single measures with big effects. In addition, these measures are technically feasible now. The most effective single measure (meat-free diet) gives a 20% reduction. The benefit of a vegetarian diet increases to about 38% when our estimates of LUC [Land Use Change] emissions are included, but this excludes the loss of soil carbon if UK grassland was converted to arable cropping. Our analysis of the effects of the production of substitutes leads to the conclusion that a broad reduction in livestock product consumption balanced by broad-based increases in crop product intake is a more feasible measure which avoids the land use burden associated with soy based livestock product analogues. A 66% reduction in livestock products delivers a 15% reduction in supply chain emissions. Moreover, reduction in ruminant production in particular will reduce methane emissions.

The main dietary changes examined would involve substantial social change. This is quite likely to be the largest barrier. Meat, milk and eggs have been part of our diet for centuries. While a substantial minority actively embrace a meat free or vegan diet, most consumers will continue to consume livestock products. The better nutritional properties of the animal products compared with the non-animal alternatives mean that vitamin supplementation is required. However manufacturing vitamin supplementation appears to be trivial in energy and GHG terms owing to the very small quantities needed.
(p.73 of pdf)

The conclusions were clearly quite in favor of adopting a vegetarian diet for environmental reasons, if anything slightly more favorable than I would have anticipated coming into this paper. The question remained, where had that quote from The Telegraph come from? I did a search of the pdf and found it, not in the conclusion, but rather in the introduction.

A switch from red to white meat will reduce supply chain emissions by 9% but this would increase our reliance on imported soy meal substantially. Our analysis indicates that the effect of a reduction in livestock product consumption on arable land use (which is a critical component of the link with deforestation) will depend on how consumers compensate for lower intakes of meat, eggs and dairy products. A switch from beef and milk to highly refined livestock product analogues such as tofu and Quorn could actually increase the quantity of arable land needed to supply the UK. In contrast, a broad-based switch to plant based products through simply increasing the intake of cereals and vegetables is more sustainable. We estimate that a 50% reduction in livestock production consumption would release about 1.6 Mha of arable land (based on the yield of crops supplying the UK) used for livestock feed production. This would be off-set by an increase of about 1.0 M ha in arable land needed for direct crop consumption (based on UK yields). In addition to the release of arable land, between 5 and 10 Mha of permanent grassland would be available for extensification, other uses, or re-wilding. Such changes would open up ‘game-changing’ opportunities but there needs to be careful assessment made in the development policy if unintended consequences are to be avoided.
(p.8-9 of pdf)

It appears that in the middle of a paragraph describing how a reduction in livestock consumption and a switch to plant based products would be beneficial, a quote on how not all processed foods obey this trend has been quote mined. The mass release of the idea that vegetarianism is worse for the environment did not trace back to a study but rather to media reporting, and now I wanted to track down where the reporting originally went wrong.

I tracked down every English news article that I could find via Google in which this study was being referenced. The list is relatively short, but these sources were then picked up by blogs and echoed all over the internet. I took down several relevant bits of information about how each source reported on the study. Here are my results:

Date	Source	Title	Vegetarian	“How Low Can We Go”	Cranfield	Donal Murphy-Bokern
01/15/10	Farmers Guardian	Major report focuses on food chain emissions	No	Yes	No	No
01/18/10	WWF	Emissions from UK food industry far higher than believed	No	Yes	No	No
01/18/10	Farmers Weekly Interactive	Farm emissions 'far higher than thought'	Yes (in quote by dairy farmer)	Yes	No	No
01/22/10	Taylor Vinters	UK food system ''must reduce carbon emissions''	No	Yes	No	No
01/27/10	The Land	UK food system emissions higher than thought	No	Yes	No	No
02/18/10	Green Fudge	WWF study shows environmental impact of food	No	Yes	No	No
02/12/10	The Telegraph	Becoming vegetarian 'can harm the environment'	Yes	No	Yes	Yes
02/12/10	The Times Online	Tofu can harm environment more than meat, finds WWF study	Yes	No	Yes	Yes
02/13/10	The Med Guru	Tofu hurts environment more than meat—study	Yes	No	Yes	Yes
02/13/10	The Australian	Tuck in and save the planet: Eating red meat is the new way to be green	Yes	No	Yes	No
02/13/10	Daily Mail	How being vegetarian does more harm to the environment than eating meat	Yes	No	Yes	Yes
02/28/10	Meat Trade News Daily	Ireland - Vegetarians damaging the planet	Yes	No	Yes	Yes

Full Data Set

I have grouped the news stories into two separate categories and then sorted them by date. The first group seems to have done a good job of reporting on the story. They all mention the title of the study they are discussing, none of the mention Cranfield University, which is hardly mentioned in the study, and the only time vegetarianism is mentioned by any of them is in a quote given by a dairy farmer to one of the articles. The second group on the other hand did not report on the study appropriately. All of them mention the word vegetarian multiple times, they all mention Cranfield University, most of them include the name of a single author, Donal Murphy-Bokern, and not a single one remembers to include the title of the study they are discussing. It is clear that several of the later ones let their imaginations loose with even the quote mined version of the quote turning a study which has condemned beef and red meat along every step of the way into, “eating red meat is the new way to be green.”

Both The Daily Telegraph and The Times Online include the clearly quote mined quote in their articles. One hint that The Times may be the guilty party is that the Daily Telegraph references a quote from Liz O'Neil, the spokesperson for the Vegetarian Society, as being given to The Times, and the article in The Times also includes the same quote. In any case, these early stories were picked up and clearly manipulated by other news outlets who appear to not even have been aware of the name of the study they were addressing. If you can't be buggered to read a study that you are writing an article about, then perhaps it is time for you to get out of journalism. Everyone who reported on this as being a mark against vegetarianism clearly did not do their due diligence at best. There is no reason why any journalist should not have been able to track down and read the original study just as I did.

Now if only I had some way of tracking down that young man I talked to at West Valley College.

Dear Abby

I was reading the newspaper this morning and the headline for the Dear Abby column caught my attention.

You don't need to alter Thanksgiving meal to appease 2 vegans

Dear Abby: Last year for Thanksgiving, I made a special effort to get the entire family together for the traditional meal. All 13 of us met at my mother's home, and everyone was to bring a dish or two to share.
One of my brothers has two college-age daughters. Both are vegan, and he insisted that all the dishes we brought be vegan. I did it, but I resented it because I felt that two out of 13 people should not decide the menu. If they wanted vegan dishes, they should bring something for themselves, while the rest of us brought what we wanted.
My brother and nieces are now asking what we're doing this year for Thanksgiving. Frankly, I don't want to go through that again. Am I wrong in thinking everyone should not bend over backward for the vegan meal? I don't mind some of the menu accommodating them, but I don't think the whole dinner should be altered.
Turkey Eater in Texas

Dear Turkey Eater: Neither do I. And the response you should give your brother (and his daughters) is that you'll be serving a traditional Thanksgiving dinner this year, so they can either bring something they will enjoy or make other plans.

I understand that being encouraged to bring our own vegan dishes is already much better than many of us vegans enjoy during Thanksgiving with family. Nonetheless, I absolutely disagree with Dear Abby and Turkey Eater in their conclusions.

The vegan daughters have a serious ethical reason for making their demands. It isn't about simply having the foods they prefer to them, but about being able to comfortably enjoy a meal with family without having to be plagued by the cruelty and suffering in every bite around them. They may be trying to throw their weight around a bit in order to save a couple extra turkey lives, and I absolutely support them in this.

Turkey Eater on the other hand is merely whining that he didn't get to enjoy the foods he preferred. He is correct that everyone should get their fair votes toward what foods they want, but food preferences are not something worth breaking up a family get together over. Serious ethical dilemmas are justified reason for the daughters to raise a concern, and I think Turkey Eater has gone much too far by choosing to cut off a part of his family because he is not willing to enjoy a perfectly fine meal with them if it cannot include his choice of flesh.

I encourage you to write Dear Abby and let her know how you felt about today's column. I am not going to write something for you to tell her, but you are welcome to take any ideas or quotes from the above in what you choose to send in.

Humor Toward Vegans?

I was perusing College Humor when I decided to do a search for anything they had relevant to the term 'vegan'. I had expected most of the results I got to be humor made at vegans' expense, but some of the results I found seemed to be much more sinister than that.

You were a vegan. You decided to constantly tell us how disgusting we were for eating meat, dairy, and the multitude of other things that even partially contain animal products. So one day, when you weren't there, I microwaved some beef stew. Then I sprinkled the broth all over your bed. You slept in cow death for weeks before you washed those sheets. I still smile a little bit every time I think of it.
Danielle Pierce, Kent State University

Sean. You're a wonderful guy, but living together means sharing responsibilities. Like washing up. Or buying new toilet paper. Or not having your idiotic girlfriend over and stealing my parking spot. So I know you're a vegan and made me get a separate fridge for my meat and beer, but you can't keep cooking that foul-smelling crap before you go to class at 6 in the morning. So you remember that one time that your tofurkey tasted so delicious? I took it upon myself to smear everything that belonged to you in the fridge with my bacon. And your door handle. And your toothbrush. Isn't veganism delicious?
Jimmy English, The College of New Jersey

Freshman year, my roommate was the definition of a pussy. The thing that pissed me off most was that he was a vegan. I would eat a burger and he would bitch me out. So one night me an bunch of buddies from our dorm filled his bed with lobsters and steak. His reaction was priceless. He flipped shit and ran out of the room crying. He went home and didn't come back for two weeks. He immediately filed for a room change and when he came to get his shit out of our dorm, he wouldn't even look at me.
Mike, School Not Given

I understand that to most people these will seem like innocent college pranks done in good humor. I know I have quite the rap sheet of pranks from my college days as well. Nonetheless, suppose for a moment that these pranks were pulled not against vegans, but against strictly religious students. A female is bothered by the strict lifestyle her Muslim roommate is constantly trying to push, so she puts pork in her burqa. A male student is bothered by his strict Jewish roommate not sharing his kosher silverware, so he covers his bed in shellfish. These aren't innocent pranks, they are acts of property damage done against someone because of their religious beliefs and would be considered in many areas to be hate crimes.

I'm not trying to argue that these pranks should be treated like violent crimes because a religion is involved. Unlike what the AETA seems to claim, property damage is not terrorism. Nonetheless, these are still criminally harmful acts. Yet the only difference between the religious examples and what has been done to these vegans is that the ethical beliefs in the case of the vegans do not require an appeal to the supernatural, and thus the vegans receive less protection under the law. In the United States, at the very least, people receiving less protection under the law because of their religion, including the lack of religion, should be viewed as a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. I am admittedly no legal expert, but I would love to see the FFRF or the ACLU take up the case of one of these vegan students.

This isn't to say humor can't be made at the expense of vegans. I found this example which did a fine job of it:

Real roommate ad 1:
"I'm 24, vegan, easy to get along with. I tend to be a bit clutter-happy, but keep the common areas tidy. I like to have guests over now and then, yours can come too! Would like to keep the kitchen vegetarian if possible."

Translation: I'm 24, passive-aggressive and self-righteous. I'm a hoarder, but if you push my stuff out of the way, you can sit down on the couch. I like to have guests over at all hours. Yours can come too, but should be willing to engage in vegetarian activities. Don't dare bring meat or milk into my apartment or I'll slaughter you in your sleep. Did I mention I was vegan?

Historic Vegan News

I have used the Google News feature to track down two of the oldest articles mentioning veganism that I can find and was quite tickled by these early depictions of vegans.

The first article comes from the January 28, 1953 edition of the Milwaukee Sentinel:

Vegans Eat No Meat, Lose Sense of Humor

DO YOU KNOW what a vegan is? If not, please be informed that a vegan is a vegetarian who, in addition to abstaining from meat, also abstains from dairy products. Are you a steak enthusiast? So am I. Do you know how the vegetarians and vegans refer to us? They say we “are addicted to the taste of dead flesh.”
A vegetarian diet may have some advantages but it seems to inspire those who follow it to express themselves in a nasty way. Also a vegetarian with a sense of humor appears to be a distinct rarity. When they do have a sense of humor it is more sarcastic and biting than kindly. As for example, George Bernard Shaw's sense of humor.

It seems the stereotype of vegans not having a sense of humor is much older than I had imagined and dates back to nearly the beginning of the term 'vegan'.

Combating this stereotype is not an easy one as rights for anyone is a very serious matter. Imagine someone who was bothered by the evil of racism hearing a friend make a racist joke. They would likely not laugh, but rather attempt to clarify their righteous discontent with their friend. The friend, however, most likely still feels that there was no harm in their humor and that the joke merely went unappreciated by their humorless companion. It is easy to see vegans being perceived in a similar way for their attempts to defend animals. Nevertheless, I still laughed when reading such an outlandish title as “Vegans eat no meat, lose sense of humor,” and at the cheap pot shot they made at the expense of George Bernard Shaw who had passed away a mere 3 years prior.

The second article comes from the January 12, 1956 edition of the Beaver Valley Times:

Lack Of Protein In Diet Causes Variety of Ills

A vegan, I am able to tell you (Webster doesn't), is a vegetarian who excludes from his diet not just meat, fish, and fowl, but also milk, butter, cheese, and eggs.
Signs of nutritional deficiency in vegans are (1) sore tongue; (2) pricking, tingling or creeping on the skin without apparent cause; (3) in women, amenorrhea and other menstrual disturbances; (4) pains in back and spine, stiff back, called “vegan back.”
These signs or symptoms occur less frequently in Dutch vegans than in British vegans, and seldom if at all in American vegans.
The total protein intake of British vegans is seven per cent, of Dutch vegans nine per cent, of American vegans nearly 10½ per cent, according to biochemical examinations of vegans apparently in good health (but most of whom had had sore tongue at some time), as reported by Wokes, Badenoch and Sinclair in Am. J. Clinical Nutrition.
THESE INVESTIGATORS state that British vegans do not consume the only vegetable foods (seaweeds and ground nuts such as peanuts) known to contain vitamin B-12. They suggest that vitamin B-12 deficiency is responsible for the definite illnesses that have gradually developed after several years in some British vegetarians who have excluded milk, cheese, butter and eggs from their diet. Milk, skim milk, separator milk, buttermilk, cheese and eggs are excellent sources of protein as good as meat protein for human nutrition.
I have known, observed and examined numerous vegetarians and it seems to me they have as much vite as people who eat fish, fowl and meat. I have not had the opportunity to examine any vegans, however.
NOT FROM PERSONAL observation but from general reading I have formed the impression that vegetarians vegetate. I do not mean to imply that they “do little but eat and grow,” but rather that they “lead a passive existence without initiative” (as Webster says). In other words, they are not aggressive.
I shall continue eating meat, fish or fowl daily if I can get it, but if I had to kill my own I'd probably become vegetarian.

I immediately recognized the first two symptoms of nutritional deficiency in vegans as being signs of B-12 deficiency. It is interesting that as early as 1956 some medical professionals had already noticed and identified this deficiency in vegans; although, they wrongly claim that seaweed and ground nuts are reliable sources of B-12.

I managed to track down the original study being referenced, which is truly phenomenal for its time. The study managed to track down 235 vegans of three different nationalities and assessed several different health factors. Nearly all of these early vegans had low B-12 levels and many were showing signs of serious deficiency.

Despite the clear and obvious symptoms of B-12 deficiency, the main focus of the newspaper article seems to be on protein, which continues to be a public misconception to this day. I sure am glad that the phrase 'vegan back' has died off however. That would certainly be a major pain in the (vegan) back to have to answer constantly.

The final bit of the article is perhaps the most disturbing. It attempts to claim that vegans, who have clearly taken initiative by choosing their diet, “lead a passive existence without initiative”. It is nice of them to at least clarify that we are not aggressive, much better than Lierre Keith does in this interview, where she practically describes herself as a violent, cannibalistic rapist while she was a vegan (I exaggerate a little, but not much). For more on Lierre's book The Vegetarian Myth I recommend checking out our closest companion blog Skeptical Vegan.

Science OR Fiction

This post is an idea I have taken from the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe podcast, which has a weekly segment by the same name. Science or fiction will work slightly differently on Vegan Skeptic. I will find three claims made within the vegan community, two based in truth and one entirely fictitious. I will give you a quote where the claim was made and its original source. Your goal is to read through the claims and decide for yourself which one is the fiction. I will then give the answers at the bottom of the post and cite first hand sources affirming or contradicting each of the claims.

Item 1: “Aurora Dairy/Horizon Organic (owned by Dean Foods) is one large, organic-certified farm that got caught violating 14 organic dairy laws, including confining their animals and denying them grazing.” Alicia Silverstone's The Kind Life.

Item 2: “Beef would cost $30 a pound if it weren't subsidized.” Best answer to this question.
“If beef weren't subsidized, it would cost about 30 dollars a pound for the consumer.” Blog post for a Vegan Restaurant

Item 3: “one medium egg contains a massive 213 mg of cholesterol. Considering that the recommended daily intake of cholesterol is 300 mg maximum daily, the consumption of even one egg per day closes in on recommended maximum dosages.” Vegan Animal Blog

Here is an image to prevent you from cheating ahead to the answers while you make up your mind:


Item 1: Science
Read the Notice of Proposed Revocation filed with the USDA for yourself. There are 14 violations listed, several of which seem to involve confinement and denial of grazing.

Item 2: Fiction
US beef production in 2009 was 26.07 billion pounds according to the USDA and has remained in the high 20-billions for the past several years.

All farm subsidies paid by the US government in 2009 amounted to $15.4 billion dollars (Typical years may be anywhere from 10-25 billion)

Even if all of these subsidies went solely to reducing the cost of beef, ignoring all other meats and all other agricultural products, this would still amount to only a 59 cent subsidy per pound of beef in 2009 and a similar amount in other recent years. It is difficult to see the price of beef jumping to $30 a pound simply by removing these subsidies.

Item 3: Science
When we go to the supermarket to find eggs, virtually all the eggs we see available for sale are advertised as large or extra-large, so we have become fairly accustomed to these as being an ordinary size for the eggs we buy and would likely call an egg advertised as being large as being fairly medium in our own experience. In actuality other egg sizes are sold. In the United States, medium eggs range from 50-57 grams while large eggs range from 57-64 grams (other nations have different standards). According to Wolfram Alpha, a medium egg contains between 123 and 159 milligrams of cholesterol while a large egg contains between 184 and 239 milligrams of cholesterol. The estimate of 213 milligrams seems pretty reasonable for what is classified as a large egg in the United States; although, it would be entirely reasonable to refer to this as “medium” in standard parlance.

Vegan Music Playlist

Free Me by Goldfinger


Eat Pussy Not Cows by Jesse Vital


Human(e) Meat by Propagandhi


Vegan Freak Radio Theme Song by Rat and K@!


Ready To Fall by Rise Against


Get Up by Goldfinger


Meat is Murder by The Smiths


Free Kevin Kjonaas by Goldfinger


Meat is Still Murder by Propagandhi


Open Your Eyes by Goldfinger


In This World by Good Charlotte


No Bones No Blood by Jah Sun


Meat Means Murder by Conflict


The Way It Is by Vegan Reich


Struggle to Survive by Freya


For the Sake of the Voiceless by New Winds


Soft Machine by By Divine Right


911 For Peace by Anti-Flag


Animal in Man by Dead Prez


One Species by xTrue Naturex


Other Songs without samples I could link to:
Ex Straightedge Ex by Good Clean Fun
Vegan Revolution Draft Dodger Anthem by Good Clean Fun

Vegans Are Awesome

A brand new video made by VeganSkeptic.



We should always make sure our arguments stand up to reason and evidence, but once we've accomplished that, then making veganism seem cool is absolutely worthwhile if that is what will help the animals.

Are Humans Omnivores?

You have probably seen some example of the multitude of posts around the internet arguing that it cannot be natural for humans to eat meat because we lack some characteristics possessed by all other meat eaters. This is a pretty weak form of argument, as can be made clear by this example:

Plants: Manufacture fructose
Animals: Do not manufacture fructose
Humans: Manufacture fructose

Plants: Are able to gather energy from the sun
Animals: Cannot gather energy from the sun
Humans: Are able to gather energy from the sun

There are two fallacies being used in this logic. The first fallacy is that of cherry picking. I have chosen only the data which confirms my conclusion that humans are plants. I have also cherry picked my definition of animals to include only the animals fitting the stereotypes I have defined. The second fallacy is guilt by association (which is itself an example of the fallacy of the undistributed middle). We have argued that all plants have some characteristic and all humans have the same characteristic and then tried to conclude from that fact that all humans are plants (although if we had a true dichotomy between being either animal or plant then actually showing that humans were not animals would be sufficient evidence to show that we were plants).

We can do better than simply pointing out that the logic behind this argument is flawed however, we can in most cases even explain why humans as traditional omnivores do not possess all these characteristics often possessed by other meat-eating species.

I have taken this post as a good example of the argument we are discussing.

Facial Muscles

CARNIVORE: Reduced to allow wide mouth gape
HERBIVORE: Well-developed
OMNIVORE: Reduced
HUMAN: Well-developed

Why are reduced facial muscles necessary for most meat eaters? The post even explains in the case of carnivores that it is in order to allow for a wide mouth gape. Some carnivores and omnivores hunt using their mouths as an important instrument in the kill. Humans do not use this method. We have historically used our hands in combination with tools in order to hunt and thus have never needed a wide mouth gape in order to hunt. This same explanation applies to why we have a seemingly herbivorous jaw type, jaw joint location, jaw motion, major jaw muscles, mouth opening versus head size, teeth of all types. There are still carnivorous and omnivorous species which do not hunt large prey with their mouths. Pigs are omnivores, eating leaves, grasses, roots, flowers, as well as insects and dead carcasses in the wild. Since their hunting style doesn't require them to kill large animals with their mouths they have facial structures very similar to our own in all of these areas.

Stomach Capacity

CARNIVORE: 60% to 70% of total volume of digestive tract
HERBIVORE: Less than 30% of total volume of digestive tract
OMNIVORE: 60% to 70% of total volume of digestive tract
HUMAN: 21% to 27% of total volume of digestive tract

Once again this applies to carnivorous and omnivorous species that hunt large prey. These animals often go for long periods between meals and then will consume a single large meal to survive on for long periods at a time. Most herbivores tend to graze throughout the day, not needing to hold a single large meal in their stomachs at once. Humans as animals that have evolved in small tribal settings have been able to share the meat of large kills with members of their community and have otherwise continued to typically eat several small meals throughout the day.

Colon

CARNIVORE: Simple, short and smooth
HERBIVORE: Long, complex; may be sacculated
OMNIVORE: Simple, short and smooth
HUMAN: Long, sacculated

Humans are along with all other primates in having sacculated colons. Ruminants are another group that tends to have sacculated colons. Sacculation of the colon in simple terms simply refers to the structure of tucks and pouches we find in our colon. In humans and primates this is thought to be a special adaptation to fermentation, allowing us to extract more energy from fiber.Source This adaptation would not be useful for carnivores who don't consume any significant amount of fiber. For other omnivores and many other herbivores they have likely all struck upon different solutions for improving digestion of fiber which doesn't require sacculation of the colon, much as many animals have evolved unique solutions to solving the problem of seeing.

Kidney

CARNIVORE: Extremely concentrated urine
HERBIVORE: Moderately concentrated urine
OMNIVORE: Extremely concentrated urine
HUMAN: Moderately concentrated urine

Animals with unconcentrated urine risk wasting too much water in order to excrete wastes through their urine. Animals with concentrated urine put themselves at higher risk of developing kidney stones and other kidney issues. Being a carnivore or herbivore has very little to do with striking this balance, while the prevalence of water plays a much larger role.

Nails

CARNIVORE: Sharp claws
HERBIVORE: Flattened nails or blunt hooves
OMNIVORE: Sharp claws
HUMAN: Flattened nails

Similar to facial structures, having sharp claws is only necessary if an animal is going to use these for hunting. Humans have never hunted using our nails and thus evolving sharp claws would be entirely unnecessary and quite a burden in our social lives. Once again omnivores like pigs or carnivores like anteaters do not have the features associated with their respective groups here.

Length of Small Intestine

CARNIVORE: 3 to 6 times body length
HERBIVORE: 10 to more than 12 times body length
OMNIVORE: 4 to 6 times body length
HUMAN: 10 to 11 times body length

This is not an accurate measure for omnivorous pigs whose, “small intestines have an average length of 15 to 20 m”Source. For those of you who aren't entirely familiar with the metric system a pig has a body length a little over one meter.

Why is this Important?

Anyone who is skeptical of veganism would see through this argument in a second. This is teeing them up to dismiss our arguments in an instant. Even more importantly however, we don't need this argument. Our recent ancestors have not been vegan, but the ethical reasons for being vegan still hold all the same. A well-planned vegan diet is still healthy during all stages of the life cycle. We don't need to use misleading claims to try to deceive omnivores when we have the truth on our side.

Veganism by Religion

How does veganism vary by religion? To actually answer that question we would need to go around to a large sample of people from various different religions until we have found enough vegans to achieve some level of statistical significance, and I by no means have the time to take on that sort of experiment. The internet however does give us a useful tool for measuring how often the phrase vegan appears in the context of certain religious key words.

For a number of the world's major religions I measured the number of hits a Google search returned for a key phrase both preceding and following the name a member of that religion would most likely call themselves. For example I measured the number of hits for “Vegan Christian” as well as “Christian Vegan” and added these numbers together. I used quotations around all of my search queries to make sure the key phrase was being used in the proper context of the religion. I also measured the number of hits for simply the religion along and recorded this as well.

Once I had recorded data for all of my key phrases I divided the total number of hits for each keyword by the number of hits for the religion alone and took the natural logarithm of this result. For example, if “Vegan Christian” returned 8000 results, “Christian Vegan” returned 3000 results, and “Christian” returned 100000000 results I would have calculated ln[(8000+3000)/100000000]. I then took the average result from this calculation between all the key phrases and subtracted that from each cell to center the values around zero. Here is a graph of my results (Click to enlarge):



One thing you might notice about this graph is that the religion “Protestant” sticks out like a sore thumb. After a bit more research I decided this was because most usage of the word “Protestant” is for events like the Protestant Reformation, while actual Protestants themselves are more likely to identify themselves as being Lutheran, Methodist, Mormon, etc. The same does not hold for their cousins the Catholics or any of the other religions given. I then replotted the results with Protestants excluded:



The phrase vegan appears around “atheist” at roughly ten times the rate at which it is found around a more common religion like “Christian”. “Atheist” also was found at the highest rate around the key phrases “vegetarian” and “animal rights” as well. Somewhat surprisingly, atheists felt the need to proclaim themselves as “meat-eating” at above the average rate as well, but not nearly to the extent they proclaimed themselves vegan or vegetarian.

Contrary to this blog, the phrase “animal rights” was nearly never mentioned with the term “skeptic” (I am aware that skeptic is not a religion, but I threw it in there out of my own interest). I suspect the reason for this is that skeptics tend to shy away from discussing ethical or philosophical questions and prefer to stick to much more easily testable hypotheses. Interestingly, while “diet” saw very little variation between different religions, it was mentioned quite regularly by skeptics in comparison, likely in response to the great deal of dietary misinformation that gets spread around the internet.

Another piece that stuck out was the rarity with with the phrase “meat-eating” was used with being “Jewish”. I suspect this is because those who identify with these two terms are more likely to call themselves meat-eating Jews as opposed to admitting their interest in “Jewish meat-eating”. Other phrases such as “Jewish vegan” and “Jewish vegetarian” still held up fine however.

Muslims seem to be the group with the worst record around animal issues, scoring last for both “vegan” and “vegetarian” and relatively high around the phrase “meat-eating”.

I would be weary attempting to draw any conclusions from this data other than pure rate at which key words appear together. As you can see, a great deal of the variation has to do with each key word's usage in language. Nonetheless, as a preliminary look into the subject I found the results quite interesting.

For all who are interested, here is a link to my raw data.

Why Vegan?

Answering questions regarding why we ought to care about anything can be quite difficult. From the perspective of our universe as a whole the intentions of a few self aware lumps of water and carbon, inhabiting a single pale blue dot, orbiting one of hundreds of billions of stars, in just one of billions more galaxies, couldn't be more trivial. However, to us, the inhabitants of that pale blue dot, those intentions determine our very existence.

A great deal can be gleaned about why we act the way we do from evolution by natural selection. In a large portion of social encounters in which we can expect a large number of future interactions with another individual, the strategy that will yield the best expected outcome for ourselves is a tit-for-tat strategy, which means we act generously in our first encounter with the individual and then in all future encounters act toward them the same way they acted toward us in our previous encounter. Members of past populations who happened to possess genes predisposing them to using this strategy were more likely to pass on their genes to future generations.

While evolution can do an excellent job of explaining why we act in the ways we do, it has nothing to say about the way we ought to act. On some occasions our own interests will come at odds with what is most likely to propagate our genes. Maxing another character in WoW is unlikely to improve your chances of reproduction, yet people continue to attempt this task by the millions.

Many people choose to act in whatever way they feel is most in their own self-interest. Often times self-interest will still include some cooperation, but the ultimate goal is still the most personal benefit. As an individual making a personal decision for oneself, this decision is quite understandable, but as a conclusion on how we ought to act, it seems to place an unjustifiably high importance on solipsism. For each of us, our own interests are what is important. We also have every reason to believe that for everyone around us, their own interests are held in that same high regard. If we ignore the solipsism for a moment, the decision that would be of the most combined importance between all lumps of water and carbon would be to act in whatever way we could to maximize the fulfillment of interests.

Humans are by no means the only species with interests. If you have ever seen a baby pig squealing and writhing as its tail is being docked, you would say without doubt there is an animal expressing a strong interest. Similarly, the pig likely has a similar interest, that it is not yet aware of, in not suffering the medical consequences of leaving the tail undocked in factory farming conditions.

If we are to live up to our goal of acting to maximize the fulfillment of interests, then this cannot include only the human species. In the case of non-human animals our efforts can often go much farther than they would with humans. For less than a cent donated, Vegan Outreach estimates they are able to save a life. Compare that with the roughly $100 it would cost to save a human life in some of the poorest countries. This is still a tiny amount when compared to the tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars many people expect in medical care in first world countries.

Many humans still suffer a great deal of pain which could be treated, but in comparison to the lifetimes of confinement and often torturous cruelty most non-human animals endure in today's factory farming conditions, this human suffering is a walk in the park. When combined with the relative simplicity of merely changing our diet, veganism clearly becomes an ethical imperative.

If you have not yet read the Why Skeptic question to our blog, I recommend doing that now as well.

Friday Fallacy - If I could Kill it Myself

This week's Friday Fallacy post is going to be an example of an ignoratio elenchi or irrelevant conclusion fallacy. Ignoratio elenchi can be used to describe a broad group of logical fallacies all of which possess the characteristic that the conclusion of the logic does not address the issue in question. This specific example of an ignoratio elenchi argument is the argument that whether or not we should be able to eat meat should be determined by our ability to kill the animals ourselves. I have chosen to call this week's fallacy “If I could kill it myself”; although, a more appropriate name for the general fallacy might be “Appeal to personal ability”.

One omnivorous blogger writes:
“I have started to realize (partially due to moving back to Alaska recently) that if I can't look an animal in the face, kill it and butcher it...should I be eating meat at all?
If I can't do it myself, I expose myself as a hypocrite, because I would rather have someone else do the 'yucky stuff' and I get to reap the benefits.”

A second omnivorous blogger seems to have put themselves through quite a bit of trauma trying to kill an animal in order to prove a point.
“I’ve spent a lot of words in recent posts explaining why I need to know where the animals come from that I eat, but standing there in the brutal sun, feeling like the earth was tilting under my feet and hearing a strange roar in my ears I questioned why this was so important. I felt quite as if I may pass out or possibly throw up at any moment, so why subject myself to this? I wish I could explain eloquently but I can’t. I only knew that if I’m going to eat meat, this was something I had to do. If animals can lose their lives for my dinner, I just needed to feel that I paid my own price, that of feeling the pain of taking one’s life.”

This is not a thought process unique to omnivores trying to justify their own actions as this vegan commenter makes clear:
“One big reason I quit eating meat in the first place was because I realized that I myself could never go out and kill another living thing, so why would I be okay with eating something someone else has bludgeoned to death?”

While our ability to kill an animal may speak to our personal squeamishness and, in the second example given above, personal resolve, it says nothing about whether the action is one we ought to do. If the simple fact that people had the ability to do things justified doing them, then we would have no grounds upon which to call any action unethical. Clearly (Modus Tollendo Tollens) our disagreement with this conclusion speaks to the fact that we do not hold this logic to be sound.

Getting Ahead in Online Dating

I wrote a post a few weeks ago on how to convert non-vegan partners to veganism, which received a fair amount of criticism for being less than romantic on the subject. I hope to make up for that by providing a few useful tips toward finding your ideal vegan partner (or partner of any sort) on an online dating site. Not all online dating sites are created equal, and the differences go well beyond what you can find just browsing their homepages. They differ greatly in the number, gender, and education level of the people you can find there.

The first thing I looked at was the gender breakdown on these sites. I got all of the information being presented not from browsing the sites themselves, but rather by using Google's AdPlanner feature and recording the traffic statistics they supply. The gender breakdown is probably most important to people seeking a partner of the opposite sex as it plays a big role in how much you will stand out amongst the other people a potential partner may be searching on these websites. Here were my results (Click to see full size):



Ignoring the male specific website GayRomeo.com for the moment, the free online dating service OKCupid.com had the largest proportion of males to females with 64% of visitors to their website being recorded as male. On the flip side, the website Zoosk.com had the largest female to male ratio with 59% of visitors being recorded as female.

More shocking than the gender split between the websites was the diversity in educational level of visitors to the sites. I recorded the percentage of users who had received a bachelor's degree or above as a good measure of educational level, and surprisingly the results varied by as much as a factor of 5.



The two best educated dating sites also happened to be the male-heavy ones with OKCupid.com coming in at 37% of visitors having a bachelor's degree or above and GayRomeo.com coming in with 34%. On the flip side, there were quite a few services with absolutely abysmal education numbers. Mate1.com had only 9% of its visitors recorded as having a bachelor's degree or above, while True.com was recorded with a mere 7%.

The final piece of information I gathered was the sheer number of unique visitors coming to each website every day. If you are looking for a very specific sort of someone, then your chances of being able to find that sort of person are much better if you have a lot more people to choose out of.



Match.com seems to be far and away the most used online dating service with PlentyOfFish.com still living up to its name.

Taking all of these factors into account I'd recommend OKCupid.com as the best option for adrophiliac (meaning attracted to adult men) users with GayRomeo.com being a close second for male androphiliacs. For gynephiliacs (meaning persons attracted to adult females) I would suggest Match.com as the best option if you are willing to pay for a dating service, and PlentyOfFish.com as the best option for a free dating service. For female gynephiliacs looking for a well-educated crowd, OKCupid.com would also make an excellent option despite the somewhat smaller population.

Is Veganism a Personal Choice?

Many people accuse vegans of being too pushy on the grounds that veganism is merely a personal choice. They are using that phrase “personal choice” not in the sense that it is a decision we have made of our own accord (as opposed to when you take off your tin foil hat and the government places the decisions there for you), but rather in the sense that it is something which is acceptable for everyone to have their own unique opinion on.

What is it that makes something a personal choice in the latter sense? Some things we can agree clearly aren't personal choices. “I choose not to murder people, but if that's your cup of tea go right ahead.” or “Molesting children isn't for me. It is your own personal decision what you want to do in that arena though.” Clearly these examples are not going to fly. Some other things clearly are personal choices. “I don't buy orange carpet because I think it looks tacky.” I might advise someone against getting orange carpet, and might even pass some negative judgment against their decorating ability, but I would still fully recognize that they ought to be able to choose any color of carpet they like.

Some other things are not as clear. If someone wishes to eat a highly unhealthy diet putting their own health at risk, most of us would agree that is entirely up to them. If we then point out that the rest of society will then be expected to pay in the form of higher taxes and higher insurance rates to cover for this person's exceedingly high medical costs, suddenly their action becomes much less of a personal choice unless they are willing to cover the full cost of their actions themselves.

In the previous example, when the person's actions were only having a personal impact, we viewed it as a personal choice. When the impact extended to have significant implications for others it was no longer a personal choice. However, when the person once again offered to prevent the cost to others it became their personal choice once again. It appears that we judge something as a personal choice if the only individual who will suffer from it is the one who made the choice.

People who are vegan for animal rights reasons are doing so because of the impact our actions have on other animals. The entire animal rights argument is based upon a characteristic which clearly defines it as not being a personal choice. Accordingly it is unproductive to criticize animal rights based veganism as a personal choice without addressing the underlying animal rights message first.

Is Vivisection Good Science?

Vivisection, originally defined as surgery conducted for experimental purposes on living organisms is now commonly used to describe any form of testing on live non-human animals. Anti-vivisection groups often criticize vivisection in the latter definition on the grounds that it is both cruel and a poor means of gathering knowledge that can be applied to our own species.

There is no question that a great deal of cruelty is involved in current vivisection practices, but is there any basis to the poor science accusation? The National Anti-Vivisection Alliance writes:

“The prime reason as to why animal testing cannot be applied to humans is due to the difference in species, genetic make-up and vary in physiology and biology. We simply cannot get the results from one species and apply it to another. Beagle dogs, for example, cannot get heart disease due to being designed for a high intake of meat in their diet due to being solely carnivores, yet heart disease is rife in the human population. Lemon juice, something used commonly, can kill cats as do grapes to dogs.”

The site is certainly correct that we would be ill advised to draw many conclusions about heart disease by studying another species that does not get it, but does this mean there is no knowledge to be garnered by using other species as models?

In the case of diet, other animals tend to make fairly poor models for humans since we have all evolved along different evolutionary paths to fill differing dietary niches. For many other things we might study this is not the case. Many other animals break down alcohol very similarly to the way we do. Why should we not be able to model the breakdown of alcohol in these animals? Many other animals have skin that bruises or burns and bones that break under similar conditions to our own. Why should we not be able to model the effects of trauma and injury on humans in these animals? Many other animals possess a very similar structure in their brains as we possess in the core region of our own. Why should we not be able to learn something about a drug's effect on the core of our brain by studying its effect in these other animals.

The American Anti-Vivisection Society claims, “Nine out of ten drugs that appear promising in animal studies go on to fail in human clinical trials,” as a reason why vivisection cannot be useful. Yet if we look back at the example of using other animals' brains as models for the core of our brain, it will certainly be necessary after this trial to ensure that a drug has no effect on other systems of our brain and that it doesn't have negative consequences on other areas of our body. We haven't learned this from the animal tests, but we still may have gathered valuable information about the way a drug operates in the area of our primary concern.

While many of the experiments currently being conducted we might not see as having any practical and applicable purpose, Carl Sagan makes the point incredibly clear in The Demon Haunted World why we must be careful when criticizing any striving for new knowledge as being without practical value:


Giving money to someone like Maxwell might have seemed like the most absurd encouragement of mere “curiosity-driven” science, and an imprudent judgment for practical legislators. Why grant money now, so nerdish scientists talking incomprehensible gibberish can indulge their hobbies, when there are urgent unmet national needs? From this point of view it's easy to understand the contention that science is just another lobby, another pressure group anxious to keep the grant money rolling in so the scientists don't ever have to do a hard day's work or meet a payroll.

Maxwell wasn't thinking of radio, radar, and television when he first scratched out the fundamental equations of electromagnetism; Newton wasn't dreaming of space flight or communication satellites when he first understood the motion of the moon; Roentgen wasn't contemplating medical diagnosis when he investigated a penetrating radiation so mysterious he called it “X-rays”; Curie wasn't thinking of cancer therapy when she painstakingly extracted minute amounts of radium from tons of pitchblende; Rowland and Molina weren't planning to implicate CFCs in ozone depletion when they began studying the role of halogens in stratospheric photochemistry.

Members of congress and other political leaders have from time to time found it irresistible to poke fun at seemingly obscure scientific research proposals that the government is asked to fund. Even as bright a senator as William Proxmire, a Harvard graduate, was given to making episodic “Golden Fleece” awards – many commemorating ostensibly useless scientific projects – including SETI. I imagine the same spirit in previous governments – a Mr. Fleming wishes to study bugs in smelly cheese; a Polish woman wishes to sift through tons of Central African ore to find minute quantities of a substance she says will glow in the dark; a Mr. Kepler wishes to hear the songs the planets sing.


We do not know the results that may come from our curious seeking of new knowledge. That said, this doesn't give researchers a blank check to use anyone or anything however they should please. Just imagine how much more we could learn with unrestricted testing on other humans! All the shortcomings and difficulties of tests in other species would be eliminated, yet for some reason modern society has nearly universally condemned the non-consensual medical experiments of Nazi Germany. Many of the animals we currently experiment on suffer much as we would in these experiments. We may require anesthesia, but by no means would we find this small token acceptable as we brutally violated humans in the same ways we do to other animals today. From an ethical perspective, our reckless testing on non-human animals is behind only our consumption of them for the greatest misdeeds of our day in terms of suffering caused.

The guidelines we place on animal testing ought to change to more resemble the ones we currently have in place protecting our fellow humans, but what effect would this have on science?

Prior to sending the first human into space, the United States had launched five different monkeys and a mouse into space between five individual missions. At the time we had little idea what effect the lack of gravity and radiation at high altitude might have on any travellers. Since these animals had all evolved with a similar dependence on gravity and ordinary radiation levels as we had, and we saw no evidence of systems in humans that should be uniquely sensitive to these conditions, these other animals made good sense as models for what might happen to a human in space. We found from these missions that the animals did survive and were able to continue to function in space with no obvious health consequences. What would the United States have done had we not been able to test on these animals? I suspect our first mission would have been to build an airplane similar to the current “Zero G” plane capable of flying in parabolic arcs for up to 30 seconds at a time simulating the weightlessness of space. Next we would have probably designed a mission to launch someone to an altitude where they could experience free fall for roughly 10 or 15 minutes. Finally once all of these had proved to be safe we would attempt a full earth orbit mission.

This would have required additional time and cost for all of the safety precautions we expect in human missions, but by no means would it have prohibited the space race. There may be other experiments that may not be as easy to replace, but we must also be careful not to underestimate our own combined ingenuity when presented with new problems to solve. A good ethical system should be able to weigh the potential harm caused to the subjects against the potential benefit for results. Today our system only begins to do that with human subjects, and comes nowhere close with non-human animals.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch

What is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch?

To quote from wikipedia, “The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, also described as the Pacific Trash Vortex, is a gyre of marine litter in the central North Pacific Ocean located roughly between 135° to 155°W and 35° to 42°N. The patch extends over a very wide area, with estimates ranging from an area the size of the state of Texas to one larger than the continental United States […] The Patch is characterized by exceptionally high concentrations of pelagic plastics, chemical sludge, and other debris that have been trapped by the currents of the North Pacific Gyre.”

Do an image search for the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and you will see results like these:







Yes, it is not necessary to dig any further than the second Google Images result to find an image with a city clearly visible in the background, and the fifth result is apparently of someone who felt the need to canoe themselves all the way out to the center of the Pacific Ocean. Viewing the contexts in which these images appear, all of them seem to imply that these are images of the actual Great Pacific Garbage Patch, despite the clear impossibility of them being such.

One group of young environmentalists concerned about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch took a trip out to the center of the North Pacific Gyre in the summer of 2007 and filmed the entire ordeal. Take a look at 1:45-5:40 of this clip to get an idea of what they found.



These young environmentalists said numerous times that they had expected to find a large floating island of garbage as far as the eye could see. What they did find was that after an hour of trawling with a very fine meshed net, they were able to fill a jar with a murky liquid of plastic. Nonetheless, they justify that this is in fact worse than what they had expected. Why would this be?

Plastics do not hold together in direct sunlight. The combination of the constant jostling of salt water and the photodegradation caused by sunlight breaks nearly everything down to microscopic pieces well before it reaches the North Pacific Gyre. The microscopic pieces of plastic remaining in the water column are called neuston plastic. These bits of neuston plastic, along with any impurities they may have contained, can still be eaten by sea life and make their way into the food chain.

A couple of studies have tried to actually measure the amount of this neustonic plastic in the water. The first such study was done from 1985 to 1988. In this study, numerous areas across the entire northern Pacific were studied for the amount of plastic they contained by trawling a 500 micrometer (0.5mm) net behind a ship for 10 minutes at a time. This study found, “Total concentrations of neuston plastic generally were low, with high concentrations recorded at only four stations in Transitional Water, at two stations in nearshore water east of Japan, and at one station in Subarctic Water; total concentrations at the other stations with plastic generally were < 10% of the highest concentration (Fig. 2). The highest total concentration was 3,941.8 g/km2 at lat. 40"00'N, long. 171'30'E near the Subarctic Front in the central North Pacific.” This survey found no clear trend of higher levels in the area typically associated with the Great Pacific Garbage Patch; although, it provided no particularly strong evidence that it wasn't there either. Typical levels found, even in the central region typically associated with the garbage patch, were roughly 400 grams (approx. 1 pound) per square kilometer. Despite the unclear nature of their results, the authors do comment on how the distribution of plastic in the Pacific likely works:


“After entering the ocean, however, neuston plastic is redistributed by currents and winds. For example, plastic entering the ocean in Japan is moved eastward by the Subarctic Current (in Subarctic Water) and the Kuroshio (in Transitional Water, Kawai 1972; Favorite et al. 1976; Nagata et al. 1986). In this way, the plastic is transported from high-density areas to low-density areas. In addition to this eastward movement, Ekman stress from winds tends to move surface waters from the subarctic and the subtropics toward the Transitional Water mass as a whole (see Roden 1970: fig. 5). Because of the convergent nature of this Ekman flow, densities tend to be high in Transitional Water. In addition, the generally convergent nature of water in the North Pacific Central Gyre (Masuzawa 1972) should result in high densities there also.”



This prediction appears to be the origin of the hypothesis that a higher concentration of plastic exists at the center of the North Pacific Gyre.



More recently, in 2001 another group went to the center of the North Pacific Gyre to specifically measure levels of plastic there. They trawled the water with a finer mesh of net (333 micrometers instead of 500) and accordingly they recovered a higher density of plastic per square kilometer than the 1988 study. The nice thing about this study is that in 2002 the same group took the same mesh of nets and went to study the densities of neustonic plastic in the water off southern California. This study was able to make numerous comparisons between waters not considered part of the gyre and what is considered to be part of the garbage patch.

“The density of neustonic plastic along the southern California coast was about three times higher than Moore et al. (2001) found in the mid-Pacific gyre, though the mass was 17 times lower (Table 3). This disparity between density and mass reflects the dramatic difference in size of neustonic debris between the gyre and the coast. Most of the neustonic plastic mass observed in the North Pacific central gyre was large material associated with the fishing and shipping industries. Most of the plastic we observed near the coast were small fragments attributable to land-based runoff.

The average plastic:plankton mass ratio was less in southern California, reflecting its higher plankton density. However, the plastic:plankton ratio on the day after the storm was higher in southern California than in the North Pacific central gyre. This change resulted from an increase in debris following a storm, rather than from a reduction in plankton. Moreover, the ratio in the North Pacific central gyre was driven by large debris. When the comparison of ratios between these two areas is limited to debris smaller than 4.75 mm, which is the fraction that filter feeders are most likely to confuse with plankton, the southern California ratio becomes twice that of the North Pacific central gyre.”

Yes, contrary to what you may expect, there were more pieces, but less plastic mass off the coast of sothern California. The reason for this, as they explain, is because most of the plastic in the gyre was a few large pieces of fishing and shipping waste that they picked up. When we limit the findings to just the smaller pieces, there was far more of this plastic in southern California, and even twice the ratio of plastic to plankton even with the higher levels of plankton.

What should we conclude from this? The hypothesis that slightly higher levels of floating waste accumulates in the North Pacific Gyre certainly sounds like a reasonable one, but at this point I'm afraid we shouldn't treat it as much more than a hypothesis. Even if proves with future research to be true, changing winds, currents, waves, and storms still disperse the floating material enough to make the accumulation modest at best. The amount of small plastic waste we find in our near-costal waters will still be higher in nearly all areas.

There are certainly good reasons to avoid letting our waste leak into the oceans or other large bodies of water. At this point I have seen no research that has been done suggesting levels of any compound of plastic degradation is anywhere near unsafe levels in the North Pacific Gyre, but that doesn't mean such a study couldn't exist. Until I see the results of such research I am inclined to believe we have little more to fear from this area as we do from our oceans as a whole. Remain conscientious of the products you use, but the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is not the reason why you should do this.